Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to a system and method to provide customer service and particularly to a system and method for improving contact routing process in an enterprise.
Description of Related Art
Contact centers are employed by many enterprises to service, inbound and outbound contacts or customers. A primary objective of contact center management is to ultimately maximize contact center performance and profitability. An ongoing challenge in contact center administration is monitoring and optimizing contact center efficiency usage of its available resources. The contact center efficiency is generally measured by metrics such as Service Level Agreement (SLA), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and match rate. Contact center resources may include, agents, communication assets (e.g., number of voice trunks, number and bandwidth of video trunks, etc.), computing resources (e.g., a speed, a queue length, a storage space, etc.), and so forth.
Service level is one measurement of the contact center efficiency. Service level is typically determined by dividing the number of contacts accepted within a specified period by the number accepted plus number that were not accepted, but completed in some other way (e.g., abandoned, given busy, canceled, flowed out). Service level definitions may vary from one enterprise to another.
Match rate is another indicator used in measuring the contact center efficiency. Match rate is usually determined by dividing the number of contacts accepted by a primary skill level agent within a period of time by the number of contacts accepted by any agent in a queue over the same period. An agent with a primary skill level is one who typically may manage contacts of a certain nature more effectively and/or efficiently as compared to an agent of lesser skill level.
There are other contact center agents who may not be as proficient as the primary skill level agent, and those agents are identified either as skill level agents or backup skill level agents. As can be appreciated, contacts received by a primary skill level agent are typically managed more quickly and accurately or effectively (e.g., higher revenue attained) than a contact received by a secondary or even backup skill level agent. Thus, it is an objective of most contact centers to optimize match rate along with the service level.
In addition to service level and match rate performance measures, contact centers use other Key Performance Indicators (“KPIs”), such as revenue, estimated, actual, or predicted wait time, average speed of answer, throughput, agent utilization, agent performance, agent responsiveness and the like, to calculate performance relative to their Service Level Agreements (“SLAs”). Operational efficiency is achieved when the KPIs are managed near, but not above, SLA threshold levels.
Throughput is a measure of the number of contacts/contact requests or work requests that may be processed in a given amount of time. Agent utilization is a measure of how efficiently the agents' time is being used. Customer service level is a measure of the time customers spend waiting for their work to be managed. Company contact center customers wish to provide service to as many requests as possible in a given amount of time, using the least number of agents to do so, and minimizing the wait time for their customers that may increase the Service Level Agreement (SLA) of the contact center. Further, the contact center may also have to maintain the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) metrics in order to maintain the KPIs of the contact center. For this purpose, agents may have to maintain the quality of services provided to the customers through multimedia (e.g., voice contacts, video contacts, emails, etc.).
Generally, when a customer contacts a contact center, for example, for a customer support service, a sales inquiry, etc., the contact is often automatically directed to an agent of the contact center. The contact is directed to an agent by prompting the customer to provide required attributes, such as a department, a skill, proficiency, and the like, that an agent must have in order to manage the contact appropriately.
In conventional techniques, a routing engine automatically selects an appropriate agent based on attributes received from a customer and then directs the customer to the selected agent. For example, a customer contacts a contact center to communicate with an agent of a credit card department to cancel a credit card then the contact center automatically directs the customer to an agent of the credit card department; however, there may be a possibility the agent may belong to a sales group of the credit card department. Further, if a contact is directed to an inappropriate agent, then the contact is redirected a couple of times before the contact is directed to an appropriate agent of the contact center. However, these techniques provide lack of flexibility in allowing customers to have significantly more choices and options in determining their view of an appropriate agent to satisfy their communication session.
There is thus a need for a system and method for selecting an appropriate agent to route a contact to the agent to improve a call routing process in an enterprise.